Same-Sex Academies Grapple With Parents' Concerns

The parents were invited for breakfast in the Spence School's seventh floor drawing room, a pretty yellow-hued space with sofas, a piano and windows overlooking Central Park. The topic for discussion was not quite as cozy: the sexual orientation of their eighth-grade daughters.

Four students at this Upper East Side girls' school have told teachers and friends they consider themselves bisexual, news that the other girls have treated with equanimity. But the subject of sexual orientation at Manhattan's single-sex schools remains a ''hot potato'' for parents, as one private school faculty member put it, and Spence, of course, wanted to do things right.

Enter Justin Richardson, a gay, 33-year-old Harvard-educated psychiatrist called in by Spence to hand-hold and lead discussion. He talked about crushes that girls have on other girls and why they experiment more often with bisexuality than boys do. But that, he said, doesn't mean they'll be lesbians. ''He was very reassuring on that,'' said Joan Liebmann-Smith, one of 25 parents who attended. Two weeks earlier, Dr. Richardson had told 250 parents at the all-girl Brearley School that when they talk to their children about sex -- 9, he said, is often the right age -- ''it is a good idea to mention that people have sex with members of the same sex sometimes, that when they grow up they may have friends who do that, and that it may be something they themselves do.''

Parent reaction ranged from enthusiasm to quiet acceptance to anger. ''Are you saying that I'm supposed to be neutral about this?'' one Brearley mother asked. ''I'm supposed to say to my daughter, 'I don't want you to drink Coke, but it's O.K. to be a lesbian?' ''

In the last two years, Manhattan's most elite, tradition-bound single-sex schools have been startled to find themselves engulfed by a debate over the development of sexual orientation in students. A small but growing number of students have come out at these schools, or at least say that bisexuality is stylish. At the same time, school administrators are increasingly concerned about the high rate of attempted suicide of closeted adolescents and the homophobia that exists at many boys' schools. Not least, administrators are also concerned about the emotional turmoil of parents, who pay $15,000 and more in annual tuition.

As a result, Dr. Richardson -- pedigreed, carefully spoken, determinedly nonthreatening -- has become the schools' gay issues consultant of choice. ''He's so sane, and he's so clear,'' said Edes Gilbert, the head of Spence.

He is not, however, unique. Members of gay teachers' groups have spoken at thousands of public and private high schools across the country. If anything, private schools in New York have come late to the issue.

But Dr. Richardson has a particularly hard job because of the anxieties at places like Spence, Brearley and the all-boy Collegiate School about maintaining admissions and not alarming trustees. ''It's important to them that they not get a reputation as a gay or lesbian school,'' Dr. Richardson said. He also knows that when it comes to most private school parents, gay is not bad as long as one's own child is not.

His toughest task is advising these parents, many of whom chose the schools precisely because they thought they were free of sexual distractions. But as gay-straight student clubs have sprung up in the last few years, some parents wonder if their children are now getting what these parents, at least, fear is gay propaganda along with a classical education. With ''homosexuality as an option,'' as Dr. Richardson puts it, same-sex schools can generate as much concern as mixed-sex schools.

''When you're a parent of a 4 1/2-year-old applying to these schools and you see an announcement about gay and lesbian events, it probably is off-putting,'' admits Dorothy Hutcheson, the head of the all-girl Nightingale-Bamford School.

Nightingale does not have a lesbian student group, although it posts notices about meetings of a gay-straight alliance that draws from a group of eight Manhattan private schools. Brearley has the Gay and Straight Partnership, or GASP, with a membership that fluctuates from 5 to 15. Spence has a student group that discusses sexual development in general. Collegiate has a cross-dresser, who has said he is confused about his sexual orientation, and an administration that is trying to promote tolerance about gay issues. ''Homophobia is pretty rampant,'' says Matt Demmer, a Collegiate 11th grader who recently heard Dr. Richardson speak.

To students, gay rights are the civil rights issue their parents never considered, and, like their parents, they enjoy making life uncomfortable for the older generation. ''They are fascinated by the extent to which it rattles the chains in the adult community,'' says one school administrator. At the very least, students see homosexuality as nothing to get exercised about. ''It's not a big deal,'' says Catherine Carlson, a Spence eighth grader who heard Dr. Richardson speak. ''It's not something that's looked on as a defect or anything.''

But even the most open-minded parents, Dr. Richardson says, can hardly be expected to be happy if a child says she is gay. ''They have good reasons for this,'' he said. ''Homosexual youths face certain hardships that heterosexual youths never will. Most parents want their children to be like themselves, or like idealized versions of themselves. Most parents are heterosexuals. And if they fear that their child is gay, they'll have a sense of loss.''

Parents often ask Dr. Richardson how they should react to same-sex experimentation. Their No. 1 question, he says, is whether the experimentation will affect a child's later sexual orientation.

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''The answer is no,'' he said. ''In fact, if this is a girl who has the genetic predisposition and early experience to grow up to be a heterosexual, then bisexual experimentation will probably only help her clarify that she is more attracted to males than to females.'' On the other hand, he says that if ''she started life on the path to being a lesbian, teen-age experimentation might help her to develop her lesbianism in a healthier way than if she were forced to ignore her true desires until adulthood.''

Not all psychiatrists agree about the effects of sexual experimentation in girls. ''Psychosexual development in girls leads to a lot more diverse pathways than in boys,'' said Richard C. Friedman, an authority on homosexuality and a professor of psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College-New York Hospital, who supervised Dr. Richardson. ''There's no easy guideline.''

Dr. Richardson, who has also lectured this year to the coeducational Dalton, Trinity and Trevor Day Schools -- his speaking fee ranges from nothing to $150 an hour -- most often talks to teachers and small groups of students. Only Spence, which has 575 girls from kindergarten through 12th grade, and Brearley have had the courage to call in parents. At the Brearley talk, a few doctors among the parents debated Dr. Richardson's conclusions (some psychiatrists say 9 is too early to introduce the idea to a child that he or she might grow up to be gay), while others, who were expecting to hear about heterosexuality because the flier advertising Dr. Richardson was entitled ''Sexual Development and Sexual Orientation in Lower, Middle and Upper School,'' left annoyed.

''It almost seems like they're presenting homosexuality to the kids as the cool thing to do,'' said the mother of a Brearley seventh grader. ''You get girls schools like Spence and Brearley, where they pride themselves on 'Girls can do anything,' so it almost gets to the point of 'Who needs men?' ''

Other Brearley parents said they were tired of hearing about lesbians. ''How much do we need to talk about this?'' one exasperated mother asked. But Joan Grubin, the head of the Brearley Parents' Association, who invited Dr. Richardson to speak, said that he was marvelous and that no one complained afterward to her.

Dr. Richardson assumes parents know he is gay, but he does not specifically tell them. ''If I go in there with a chip on my shoulder and say, 'I'm gay and I had a rough time in high school and by God I'm not going to let that happen to your kids,' '' he said, talking in his private office on West 12th Street, ''well, that would be a recipe for disaster.''

Dr. Richardson has a tendency to speak in clinical paragraphs. But he does revert on occasion to colloquial English. ''I'm sure there are parents who are totally cool about this,'' he says, ''but I don't know any of them.''

He was born in Greenwich Village and grew up in Rockland County, where he was raised, he said, ''like a suburban dauphin.'' His mother, an associate professor of psychiatry at New York University Medical Center, and his father, a podiatrist, saw to it that young Justin was tutored in German, French, pottery and voice. He came out at Harvard College, then started a counseling service for gay students while at Harvard Medical School.

''I was trying to protect students from going through the difficulty that I went through,'' he said. ''Which was not about bias or discrimination. It was about my own personal anxiety in being gay.'' After a chief residency in psychiatry at the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital, Dr. Richardson returned to New York, where he founded the Columbia Center for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Mental Health.

He got started on the private school circuit two and a half years ago, when he spoke to a group of girls' school administrators at Spence. He impressed Evelyn J. Halpert, the outgoing head of Brearley. ''He doesn't sensationalize the issues,'' Mrs. Halpert said.

Although Dr. Richardson says he often hears from students that bisexuality is in vogue, he says he is not sure exactly what that means. ''I would assume that it's encouraging more kids to say that they're bisexual,'' he said. ''Whether it's encouraging kids to have sex with members of the same sex, I don't know.''

One question parents ask is why there is so much emphasis on what Dr. Richardson himself estimates is only 2 to 6 percent of the adult population. What about the needs of a vast heterosexual majority of high school students?

''They will all grow up to know somebody who is gay,'' Dr. Richardson responded. ''And they need to be educated about that.''